Community and social computing

It has been an interesting time at the Social Networking Conference in San Fran this week. I ran into some great folks on many fronts including mobile social networks, social software in the Air Force, in GE, in GM, and much more. I did my presentation on how to help teams decide on the base level of social context that they may be interested in.

In quick step, this is what you consider instead of picking a tool right away. It is the vocabulary that you need to define the perspective that you want your social group to see as well as the rules on how the group should interact. The five social perspective models I highlighted are the:

Personal -- only seen by you, and arguably social at the very minimum

Individual -- how a person shares information with others in a shared environment

Defined Group -- how a group of people agree to collaborate in an environment solely for their own use

Community -- an open group where many people can come and go, but collaborate over time

Mass Collaboration -- an environment where each person works for their own goals, on an aggregate level may converge on one idea or another

I also covered several social governance models, on how people agree to work together, choose leaders, and make decisions:

Centralized - a single person or a few people who make all the decisions

Delegated - assigned areas spread across a core group who make all the decisions

Republic - an elected body of people who make the decisions as proxies for the rest of the population

Starfish - a group that agrees on common principles but handles decisions on a local basis

Swarm - decision-making across a mass population based on voting to determine ideas

In any case, here's the deck. [I moved my presentation to Slideshare; or see it on my space]. It is mostly visual, but there are some speaker notes included as well. I'd be interested in hearing more thoughts on this.

You may have already heard about Facebook's new look as they change the social experience for users. While still focused on the Individual as the center of the experience, they are adding more capabilities. In particular, I'm amused that they are finally catching onto the idea of multiple tabs each per application, although they have not moved to free form tabs like developerWorks Spaces, netvibes and other sites. Separating the app to a different tab helps to create shorter, cleaner front pages, by compartmentalizing and creating subtopics. However, it is better if it is not limited to a single application; after all you might have several tools and widgets to focus around the same topic.

-rawn

PS: I'm trying out AddThis, a service that lets users redistribute any URL to over 30 other social sites, saving me the trouble of adding links to digg, del.icio.us, etc. manually.

If you have not come across it before, web2logo.com provides an extensive listing of companies in the social computing and Web 2 space. There seems to be approximately 1000 companies listed there in one form or another. Some logos are repeated (e.g. Google in different versions) but that's rare. Clicking on a logo will give a description from Web2list, site traffic data from Alexa, and current Technorati-tracked blog activity for each of them. It's hard to say if this data is accurate but it does give an idea of which ones are doing decent enough to watch.